Short Stories – An Abortion Death

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If there is one thing that reproductive rights advocates and historians can tell you with certainty it is that laws which attempt to prohibit abortion are abject failures and correlate directly to a rise in deaths for women who seek them. It is true now and it was true a century ago.

My research on working women in San Francisco on occasion led me to stories such as the one below about Miss Viola Van Ornum. This particular case caught my attention because of what seems to have been an unusual twist to the story.

The basis of the story in the San Francisco Call from June 27, 1901, was a coroner’s inquest. Two of the more predictable plot points were that the first victim, Miss Van Ornum appears to have died after “taking medicines sold her by one Dr. Popper for the purpose of producing an abortion.” Although the article does not say as much, the implication was that Dr. Popper was a quack of limited ability. The toxicologist who examined Van Ornum found traces of cotton root in her stomach.

According to one account, with the westward migration of English-speaking Americans to the Southwest came the “use of cotton root bark as an abortifacient, frequent among black slaves” [1]. Although she arrived at the hospital suffering from strong convulsions, the toxicologist testified, “cotton root is not a powerful poison,” which is also consistent with a finding that it exhibited the lowest toxicity of known abortifacients causing only nausea and occasionally vomiting [2]. It would seem Dr. Popper did not simply provide Van Ornum with a tea made of boiled cotton root bark.

The second not-at-all-surprising part of the story was that it appears she was put into this predicament by a sexual affair she was having with Charles H. Parent, a “bald and middle aged” man who had a wife and daughter in Los Angeles. He claimed, of course, that he “tried to preserve her good name” and “against his advice, [Van Ornum] took the nostrums given her by Popper.” From my experience those two claims are contradictory. Due to the great shame and difficulties she would have been subjected to for having a child out of wedlock, and of course the potential problems for Parent if she had given birth to his child, it seems more than reasonable that his desire to protect her would have produced the opposite result and he would have encouraged to have an abortion [3].

After some more digging on this story, which I did not take the time to do when I first encountered it years ago, it appears that Parent was a real estate dealer with an office in San Francisco. Van Ornum had arrived in the city just a few weeks prior to her death and had been presented to those that knew the couple as his wife. It was reported that Van Ornum had come to the city “to have a criminal operation performed.” When no one she spoke with would operate, she ended up with “three bottles of medicine.”[4]

The third point in the story that was unexpected and not explained entirely to my satisfaction was the fate of Dr. Victor Popper. According to a different article, Popper was 75 years old and registered with the city as a chiropodist, a foot doctor [5]. After alternately obstructing and cooperating with the detectives that were sent to his house to investigate, it was determined that he had prescribed the drugs that killed Van Ornum. He confessed to the incriminating evidence they found in his residence. Before the police took him into custody, he excused himself to an adjoining room from which he returned a moment later, threw an empty glass bottle at their feet, and shouted “I have fooled you all,” and died from ingesting carbolic acid moments later.

That additional article I uncovered also suggested that besides the obvious motive of the elderly Popper committing suicide rather than face a trial for the death of Van Ornum, he was estranged from his wife and son and had previously contemplated suicide.

[1] George A. Conway and John C. Slocumb, “Plants Used as Abortifacients and Emmenagogues by Spanish New Mexicans,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 1, n. 3 (1979): 243.

[2] Conway and Slocumb, “Plants Used as Abortifacients,” 244.

[3] “Neglect by a Surgeon Destroys Evidence,” San Francisco Call, 23 June 1901.

[4] “Outwitted His Captors,” San Diego Union, 22 June 1901.

[5] “Doctor Drinks Carbolic Acid,” Morning Press, 22 June 1901.